Lucrecia Martel’s ‘Nuestra Tierra’ Explores Murder Of Indigenous Leader

When we speak of “we” as a society, who is being referred to? Who is being left out?

That’s one of the prime questions underpinning Lucrecia Martel’s documentary Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks), which just screened at the Camden International Film Festival in Maine, following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and North American premiere at TIFF.

In the context of her home country of Argentina, which saw the Indigenous population wiped out or displaced through colonization by Spain and successive waves of European immigration, the question of “we” becomes particularly acute.

“Is it the white ones, children of immigrants?” Martel asked during a Q&A at CIFF. “Is it the Indigenous community? …We have made a great effort to keep them out of history. What does this word [‘we’] mean? Argentine history, to whom does it belong?”

The documentary centers on the Indigenous Chuschagasta community of the north of Argentina, who have been systematically dispossessed of their land – hence the title Nuestra Tierra, “our land” – and often forced into the position of renting various hectares from the descendants of European colonists. The very existence of the Chuschagasta is disputed by some with power in Argentina who make the vague claim that they “disappeared” sometime in the 19^th century.

In 2009 three armed white men entered the Chuschagasta’s lands asserting legal title to the area. After tribal leader Javier Chocobar raised a still camera to record what the men were doing, one of them shot him dead.

“This crime was plainly captured on video, yet it took nine years of protests before the culprits were brought to trial, where they claimed no wrongdoing,” the TIFF program writes. “Nuestra Tierra alternates between monitoring the tense legal proceedings, allowing Chuschagasta community members to share their stories through interviews and archival materials, and offering breathtaking explorations of this beautiful land that is being reduced to property, and whose ownership is being contested.”

Having to go through the court system to seek justice – be it for the killing of Chocobar or to assert control of their own land – already puts the Chuschagasta at a disadvantage. The courts – and their reliance upon “documents” that can be falsified or manipulated to suit the interests of the powerful – were never designed to serve the needs of the Indigenous. In the film, the Chuschagasta dutifully try to follow all the court’s procedures – los trámites, in Spanish – yet they’re constantly entangled in bureaucracy.

“One can end their life without having known love, perhaps even infidelity, but it’s very difficult for any of us anywhere on the planet to end our lives without having had to do a trámite (bureaucratic step or procedure),” Martel observed mordantly. “And the trámite (procedure) is where communities and all the people who are disregarded by any country’s system waste their lives, their time. They spend endless hours waiting to fill out paperwork to get a signature that will recognize something so they can continue a process. And a trámite is the way a country tortures people [who are] the most vulnerable.”

At the Q&A, Martel was asked a question by a festival programmer that she interpreted as raising a doubt as to whether she, as a non-Indigenous person, had the right to tell a story about the Indigenous.

“There’s a problem that all of us in the film industry have, which is that now there’s this thing about who has the right to speak,” Martel replied. “So, women have to talk about women, men about men, Black people about Black people, Indians about Indians. We can’t live on a planet like this. We need to share, and it’s very difficult.”

She added, “When I made this film, I was really afraid of not interpreting well or editing whatever the community had said, but I prefer to pay the price of horror if I’m wrong than not make a film that I feel is important to me, to understand myself at least a little bit within Argentina. We can’t continue with that fear of, ‘Oh no, I can’t make a film about [thus and such].’ We can’t have that limitation because culture is also about making mistakes in the intention to communicate.”

Next month, Nuestra Tierra will screen at the Vancouver International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, and the BFI London Film Festival, and the Chicago International Film Festival. The documentary culminates with a verdict in the murder case, and a note about the fate of the defendants. What remains very uncertain is what will happen to the Chuschagasta, their land, and their place within Argentina.

“The idea of ​​this film was, of course, to collaborate with that community, the Chuschagasta community, which has been fighting for its territory for a long time,” Martel commented, “but it was also about trying to understand ourselves.”